The creator of the enthralling BBC drama grew up in Cannock and worked as a doctor in Birmingham and Wolverhampton before switching careers.

Jed Mercurio, writer and creator of the popular Bodyguard series, also spent time in the RAF.

The series has shown central themes in his work which can be traced back to his time in the Midlands.

Here are 10 reasons why we believe the series could have been based on his experiences locally.

Main character David Budd wanted to be a doctor

In bed with the Home Secretary, played by Keeley Hawes, the close protection officer confesses that he once wanted to be a doctor instead of his previous career in the armed forces.

He says: “You’ll probably laugh but when I was at school I wanted to be a doctor…To get into medical school you need work experience, you have to get that by knowing a doctor who’ll get you in. I had no idea where to start, so never applied.”

Mercurio, now 52, trained as a doctor at the University of Birmingham and put his experiences working in the hospitals of Birmingham and Wolverhampton into his first TV script, Cardiac Arrest.

It’s said that his role on the frontlines of the NHS, and his less traditional route into scriptwriting, has given him a maverick touch and allowed him to create realistic scenes in his dramas.

Jed Mercurio pictured in Birmingham in 2002 (image: BimringhamLive)

Mercurio has also been outspoken about discrimination and elitism. On Twitter, he said a TV documentary almost put him off applying for medical school.

He wrote: “The panel rejected a working-class candidate for his ‘narrow horizons’ but had no issues with a privately-educated candidate who was clueless about the causes of homelessness.”

While a junior doctor, Mercurio replied to an advert in the British Medical Journal from a production company wanting a new hospital drama and wrote inbetween his 56-hour shifts. As he was still working for the NHS and living in Selly Oak when it was screened, he used the pseudonym John MacUre. It didn't take long to discover his identity, but by then he had ditched medicine for a full-time writing career under his own name.

He bought a Porsche with the earnings from Cardiac Arrest.

The series was considered very different from usual medical dramas, with a more cynical look at the NHS with plenty of black humour.

Read More

The first episode featured an idealistic junior doctor realising he has been grossly under-prepared by medical school and has almost no idea what to do.

At one point he has to work for three days and nights in a row with hardly any time to sleep.

Mercurio followed this up with Bodies, which was ranked by The Times as ninth in its list of Shows of the Decade and cited by The Guardian as among the 'greatest TV dramas of all time'.

Physical scars and psychological trauma

Image from episode six of the Bodyguard

David Budd bears the scars of a tour of duty in Afghanistan on his body and also has Post-Tramautic Stress Disorder.

Birmingham is home to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, which houses the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine for military personnel injured in conflict zones.

The world-leading centre would have been familiar to Mercurio, who was educated at Birmingham University Medical School and lived in Selly Oak.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (Image: BirminghamLive)

He also joined the RAF while a medical student, training with the University Air Squadron, another military connection.

Mercurio was a medical cadet, which means he was sponsored to become a doctor.

He also helped to write four episodes of the first, 2010, series of Sky1 action drama Strike Back, which is based on the novel by Chris Ryan of the SAS.

The Home Secretary references Birmingham in a speech before she is blown up

The speech (Image: BBC)

In a speech the Home Secretary, as played by Keeley Hawes, says: “Frankly we’ve got to do a better job of stopping a 15-year-old thinking that growing up in Bradford or Birmingham is grimmer than jihad.

“And we can only change their minds with the right leadership.”

As she delivers her speech on stage, Julia Montague is caught up in explosion- and an almighty plot-twist.

Hospitals

The sterile, charmless environments of hospital wards and waiting rooms are the setting for the aftermath of the explosion that kills the Home Secretary.

The gathering of the deceased and furtive enquiries from detectives on the wards are things that Mercurio is likely to have witnessed while on the frontlines of the NHS in the West Midlands.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (Image: BirminghamLive)

Cardiac Arrest was based on sketches he had written on the theme of medical students on a ward round being aggressively questioned by a consultant.

The cold image of the hospital environment is continued in Bodyguard.

Police crime rooms

CCTV and forensic evidence is examined in police operation rooms during Bodyguard.

While these could arguably have been any police offices in the country, Mercurio would have had insights into this world in Birmingham, which he previously used as a filming location for Line of Duty.

The practices involved with tracing firearms also mirror investigations carried out by West Midlands Police in recent years, with single firearms being linked to many shootings.

The first series of Line of Duty was shot in Birmingham, with locations including New Street, the old Central Fire Station on Lancaster Circus and Heartlands Parkway.

The fictional police office was based in the former Municipal Bank on Broad Street.

The Bodyguard (Image: BBC)

Use of procedure

One of Mercurio’s hallmarks is that he can make a terse interview in a police station just as interesting as an action sequence.

The close attention to detail and the scrutiny that practitioners can be held under would have been paramount to his role in the NHS.

Bernard Padden, a scriptwriting tutor at Staffordshire University, said: “Jed Mercurio is possibly, along with Russell T Davies, the most accomplished television dramatist around at the moment.

“Even before Bodyguard he wrote Line of Duty, which transformed the police genre and raised the game massively.

"Mercurio’s killer touch is his knowledge of procedure and the way police, hospitals and governments work.

"He draws on his own experience and must do an incredible amount of research. He uses this knowledge to create a sense of realism you don’t seen in other dramas and crime shows.

"Mercurio is able to uses interview scenes that are just as compelling, if not more so, as an extended car chase sequence.”

Lethal mistakes

Viewers have been gripped by the Bodyguard series

Mercurio has used the theme of mistakes that lead to deaths in his medical dramas and one of his novels, Bodies.

In the book, a junior doctor's blunder leads to the death of a woman Tormented by guilt, he determines to learn from his error but his idealism is all but crushed under the realities of life and death on the wards. Elsewhere, casualty officers fail to spot diabetes in a woman who is left brain -damaged, an arrogant consultant brutalises his patients and a man is killed by an allergic reaction to the wrong kind of antibiotics.

In a grisly piece of bureaucracy, another patient chokes to death because a specialist refuses to see him unless he is referred to him by a doctor of equal rank.

Behind all the horror stories looms a hospital and an entire medical establishment that plough on like an unstoppable juggernaut.

Doctors and nurses collude in cover-ups. Nobody wants to risk their career by being a whistleblower. When a couple of doctors do have the courage to stand up and be counted, it is they who are suspended and destroyed.

Read More

In Bodyguard, close protection officer David Budd comes under scrutiny over his vigilance - or otherwise - when the home secretary he is assigned to protect is seemingly caught in a bomb blast.

Suspicions also fall on his actions protecting the government minister in other parts of the series.

Mercurio is a master of the high-stakes game.

Maverick touch

Image from episode 6 of the Bodyguard

Mercurio's unconventional entry into the screenwriting world is said to have given him an unusual approach and an unsentimental treatment of power figures.

Bernard said: “Mercurio stands out as a scriptwriter because all of his characters are interesting, even the comparatively minor ones.

"He’s very good at drawing character. You can see this in Bodyguard and Line of Duty. But he’s not afraid to kill off major characters and I never expected to see the Home Secretary get blown up. The way he tells stories is phenomenal.”

That thrilling train station sequence

Mercurio has spent time commuting between London and the West Midlands, travelling back at least once a month.

Commuters will know how the mind wanders on those long journeys on Chiltern and Virgin carriages, with the dark countryside on the outside eerily similar to the scene in the first episode.

Hopefully thoughts of terrorists hiding in the toilet will remain far removed.

Secrets and lies exposed

The Bodyguard series

Mercurio has repeatedly used the theme of a light being shone into dark places, whether it be police corruption or the heart of the security services.

Cardiac Arrest, for example, showed the NHS to be a hotbed of racism, homophobia, bullying and sexual harassment.

But despite complaints, it has topped polls of the UK medical profession as the most realistic medical drama of all time. With this drama, Jed continued to shine a light on aspects of the NHS that patients might prefer not to know about, with its gritty storylines and gruesome surgery scenes.

However he always played his cards close to his chest about his real-life experiences on the wards in Birmingham.

The scriptwriter has declined to say which hospitals he has worked in to avoid fingers being pointed in the wrong direction.

Skulduggery, internal investigations and tensions at high levels is a recurrent theme in his most successful shows.